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Americans Work 25% More Than Europeans, Study Finds (bloomberg.com)
Americans are addicted to their jobs. U.S. workers not only put in more hours than workers do almost anywhere else. They're also increasingly retiring later and taking fewer vacation days, reports Bloomberg. From the article: A new study tries to measure precisely how much more Americans work than Europeans do overall. The answer: The average person in Europe works 19 percent less than the average person in the U.S. That's about 258 fewer hours per year, or about an hour less each weekday. Another way to look at it: U.S. workers put in almost 25 percent more hours than Europeans. Hours worked vary a lot by country, according to the unpublished working paper by economists Alexander Bick of Arizona State University, Bettina Bruggemann of McMaster University in Ontario, and Nicola Fuchs-Schundeln of Goethe University Frankfurt. Swiss work habits are most similar to Americans', while Italians are the least likely to be at work, putting in 29 percent fewer hours per year than Americans do.
I mean bragging about our victory over socialized medicine is fun and all..
Need more unions and workers rights!
As Americans measure everything by size and not quality, I am not surprised by this. My USA counterparts are much more at the office, and producing less work than the continental ones. Make a study about effectiveness and I am your man!
Wage slave here. Recently changed jobs (moved) and new company gives only 8 days a year vacation+Personal Holiday+mandatory holiday. I would love to work less... My wife and I are still discussing if we could afford for me to be Mr. Mom and her to work (she does make 2x what I make)... Lately I have been working the actual hours I get paid for, and have even been taking all of the breaks I am entitled to, but nobody ever takes, and my life satisfaction has gone way up. It's not that most americans are addicted to their job, it's that they are made to feel that if they don't work 120% of the hours they are "paid to work" then they will look like slackers and be let go.
What do they have to show for it? That depends on whether you fit in.
If you fit in, you've got money to show for it.
If you don't fit in, you've got nothing to show for it.
Pfft. Get back to me when hours worked equals productivity.
I had a dream, bright and carefree, but now there's doubt and gravity
Conventional wisdom says that everything about Europeans is always better than everything about Americans. You get socially rewarded by high-social-status people for saying so. So not working is better than working in this case, regardless of whether that makes sense or not.
I am very interested in how they defined the productivity per worker. The article does not state that. From the numbers they show, my gut feeling is that they simply divided the gross national product by the number of employees, which is a wildly inaccurate way of defining productivity. Norway is not significantly more productive than Sweden or Denmark - it just has a lot of oil and those two countries do not. The relative sizes of the financial sector in different countries adds a similar distortion and there are many more factors to consider. How much a worker actually contributes to productivity is very hard to measure objectively. The GDP per worker does not tell much of that story.
Productivity and "working more" are not the same thing.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Yeah, all my friends who brag about working 10h-12h days spend much of it online social media or shooting the proverbial shit.
I come in at 6:30-7 and I spend 4-5h on mental stuff but then I'm utterly done. Got a good boss, he knows I get the plurality of team's shit done and doesn't blink twice when I head out at lunch at noon and don't come back till 3:30 because I'm playing disc golf or some such, see if I missed anything and head home.
Any of the seatwarmers here try that and they'd be out of work the next day. But then they take a week to solve problems it takes me a day, tops, all because they can't concentrate. Multitasking, my ass.
We will soon find out, I fear. The UK has already been talking about which employee rights will be removed once it leaves the EU. Time off proportional to overtime looks like it will be the first thing to go, but they keep talking about making the UK more "competitive", by which they of course mean lower wages, longer hours and fewer expenses like safety equipment and adaptations for people with disabilities.
So it is likely we will find out just what that does to productivity soon, giving us an opportunity to compare the EU and US models.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
EU overall trades at a *profit*. There may be some of the smaller countries struggling (notably Greece) but overall EU does not have to internally inflates its economy with QE.
This is a problem with a few key economies that run at huge deficits and go the easy short-term route of internally inflating their economies. Japan had it for decades, US followed, UK joined them.
The fact that a lot of people in the US have multiple jobs working many hours just to be able to buy food and pay rent is not something you should be proud of.
True. It also doesn't take into account the quality of work done. It might just mean Europeans are 25% more efficient.
I think it means that Americans get less paid vacation than Europeans and they are more afraid of losing their jobs.
Multitasking just means you do a lot of jobs at once, poorly.
Mmm, that's productivity per worker. If that Frenchman, who manages to be within about 1.5% as productive as an American while working 20% less tells an American something about productivity, the American might want to grab a pen and take notes.